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Colan Nielsen

Day Two Learnings From the Three-Ring MozCon Circus

SEO Events

The author's views are entirely their own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

Day one of MozCon Virtual gave us a great start to this year’s conference – from surviving the COVID news agenda, to the science of purchasing power, to game-changing ways to use the Google Search Console API. If day one was a preview of things to come, I knew we were all in for a treat as we headed into day two!

With that said, day two has arrived!

Oh, and before I forget, remember that dance breaks are not just okay, but encouraged at MozCon.

Ross Simmonds – Why Marketers Should Think More Like Investors To Drive Content Results

In this session, Ross talked about the parallels between content marketing/SEO and the world of investing. I am a lover of analogies, so I was excited to see how Ross was going to show us how an investment mindset can be applied to content marketing and SEO. As someone who loves SEO, and investing, I was pumped for this one.

Ross began by telling a story about his investment in General Motors stock. He put a lot of money into the stock…and it crashed. Ross had not done enough research into GM before making his investment.

The lesson: you need to invest time into doing your homework! You need to understand the market before you jump in. The same applies to SEO.

We all hope that our investments will deliver a return, but in 2020 we were all tested during the pandemic. Many companies put the investment of SEO on pause...and that was a mistake. Even during a recession, people still have a strong desire for content and information.

As Ross explained, every piece of content you create is an asset, and to see the most from our investments, we need to “invest more — guess less”.

Content presents money printing capabilities, and major companies are starting to realize this.

Needless to say, Ross left us all wanting to diversify our content portfolios!

Areej AbuAli — Taking Charge of Your Indexability: How to Optimize and Prioritize Your Technical Work

If you’re ready to take control of your website indexing, this session is for you! With a focus on aggregators and classifieds, Areej shared advice on how to best reduce index bloat for large websites.

She acknowledged that, while we are fully in control of how Google crawls and indexes our site, it can feel scary!

So if we’re suggesting audits, let’s focus on recommendations that can have an impact. Let’s “drop the 100-page audit!”. Websites do not (and most probably should not) need to have every single page indexed. Instead, focus on indexing pages that have the potential to provide good search results.

Honestly, there were so many amazing insights from this presentation, this is one you’ll want to revisit!

Joy Hawkins — To Post or Not to Post: What We Learned From Analyzing Over 1,000 Google Posts

What value do Google Posts have, and how should the average SMB prioritize them? Joy Hawkins dove headfirst into the data from two studies to answer these questions.

Joy opened up by sharing a Mario Kart analogy. Joy is a super competitive person. She shared how she followed a similar approach for this study as she did when she was working towards beating Dave DiGregorio at Mario Kart. Let’s just say that it required a lot of research, tracking, and analysis.

Joy shared a disclaimer and some initial considerations for the presentations data:

  • The data set only had a total of 36 conversions

  • Clicks in Google Analytics DO NOT equal clicks in Google My Business Insights

Study #1

The first study Joy covered analyzed over 1,000 Google Posts to see what types perform better based on clicks and conversions while measuring the impact of various features such as stock photos, emojis, titles, and more. Here are the types of Google Posts that Joy analyzed:

  • Offer Posts

  • COVID Posts

  • Event Posts

  • Update Posts

Joy also summarized the worst-performing post types. And the winners are:

  • Reviews

  • Seasonal/Holiday

  • Products (or services)

  • Who We Are (bios)

Study #2

The second study looked at whether posting on Google has any influence on where your business ranks in the local pack. The conclusion? Google Posts had no measurable impact on rankings.

Joy summarized by providing a “Successful Google Post Blueprint” — this is one to save for later!

Joyce Collardé — Maximize Your Conversions: Harnessing Full-Funnel Optimization for B2B Success

In this session, Joyce covered the long sales cycles for B2B businesses that pose a unique set of challenges for converting visitors into coveted users. Success requires a strategic approach that goes beyond the landing page to include your entire site.

Joyce walked through strategies for three tried-and-true methods for increasing your conversion rate and winning more business:

  • Goal #1: Attracting users to your website

  • Goal #2: Giving users the best experience and leading them to conversion points

  • Goal #3: Tracking success and encouraging return visitors

Casie Gillette — Counterintuitive Content: How New Trends Have Disrupted Years of Bad Advice

I love the honesty in this tweet from Casie!

In her presentation, Casie looked at content from an entirely different perspective and talked about how you can start creating content on your own terms, because really, there's no one way to do content marketing.

According to Casie, counterintuitive marketing is “the idea of bucking trends to do what is right for YOUR site”. Casie showed that more content is NOT always best. Sometimes optimizing existing content can be far more powerful than creating new content.

There is no one size fits all solution to content marketing. Things change and sometimes you need to think counterintuitively.

How do we do this? Casie suggests a few focus areas:

Performance

    • What were your goals and did you hit them?

    • Utilize Google Search Console to find opportunities

    Competitors

    • Don’t copy competitors, but pay close attention to what they are doing for ideas. What is working well that we can do better?

    • Utilize social media platforms, such as LinkedIn where you can gather intel on the ads that your competitors are running.

    Search and keywords

      • Don’t forget to go back each year and re-evaluate the keywords that you are targeting

      • Remember, that just because something is driving traffic, it doesn’t mean that it’s the right traffic.

      Brie E Anderson — Reporting for Duty: Why You Need to Start Using GA4 TODAY

      Despite some pre-conference nerves, Brie absolutely blew us away with all her insights!

      She also challenged us to get started with GA4 now — before we have to.

      Brie told us that in GA4 we’ll find:

      • EASY, ADVANCED, TRACKING

      • BADASS (& CUSTOM) VISUALS

      • GOOGLE MAY TELL US SECRETS

      But also highlighted that it is NOT a replacement for Universal Analytics, so you need to track both.

      You might ask, then what are the benefits of using GA4? I’ll let some of Brie’s fans outline some highlights:

      What are you waiting for? Get your website into GA4!

      Rob Ousbey — Beyond the Basics: 5 SEO Tricks for Uncovering Advanced Insights from Your SEO Data

      In this session, Rob showed us how to breathe new life into our standard SEO data, and we walked away with more advanced insights — and new tools — that are sure to impress our team (and our boss!)

      And what are the five SEO tricks?

      1. Find link opportunities from the SERP

      2. Group ranking keywords to spot split opportunities

      3. Tag URLs to find real issues

      4. Tag GA for category-level insights

      5. Tag competitors’ top URLs for ideas

      Be sure to check out Rob’s presentation in the MozCon video bundle when it’s out on Friday for even more amazing tips!

      Britney Muller — The Cold Hard Truth about CTR and Other Common Metrics

      Britney closed out day two by showing us how to quash our reporting woes and make easy work of identifying exactly why your website’s performance changed.

      She asked us what makes superforecasters — a group that has predicted future events with a great deal of accuracy — so successful. Before giving us the answer, she reminded us that it’s really easy to be led astray by data — but had some tips and tools to share to help make sure we don’t get too off track.

      So, what made superforecasters so successful? Their ability to rethink everything. To do the same, Britney challenged us to:

      • Think like a scientist

      • Define our identity in terms of values, not opinions

      • Seek out information that goes against our views

      Day two — done!

      Wow! Only one more day left for this year's MozCon! What stood out the most for you on day two? Tell us on Twitter with #MozCon!

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      Colan Nielsen
      About

      Colan began his career in the local SEO world back in 2010. He became a Google Product Expert at the Google My Business forum in 2014. This allowed him the opportunity to help 1000s of business owners navigate the often confusing world of Google My Business. In 2017 he joined the Sterling Sky team as VP of Local Search, and has served as a faculty member at LocalU and an administrator at the Local Search Forum, both affiliate organizations of Sterling Sky, since coming on board. When he isn't doing local SEO, you can find him spending time with his lovely wife and two young children or kicking butt while training and teaching Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

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